Introduction to 15-410

1
Introduction to 15-410

• Dave Eckhardt
• de0u_at_andrew.cmu.edu

2
Synchronization

• Textbook
• Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne
• Operating System Concepts, 6th edition, Windows
  XP Update, ISBN 0-471-25060-0
• CMU Bookstore has copies of text
• If you plan to add, please do so ASAP
• Creating your personal AFS volume takes time
• Self-assessment exercise?

3
Outline

• People
• Me, us, you
• Administrative information
• Academic conduct
• Class goals
• Reading material

4
Dave Eckhardt

• Buzzword compliance
• Ph.D., Computer Science, CMU, May 2002
• An Internet-style Approach to Managing Wireless
  Link Errors
• Building Unix kernels since 1985
• PDP-11, Version 7 Unix
• Not really a BSD bigot
• The horror, the horror
• www.cs.cmu.edu/davide/

5
TA's

• Michael Ashley-Rollman
• veteran 15-410 TA
• Claire Tokar, Jonathan Curley, Ivan Jager
• 15-410 student in previous semesters
• Two other mysterious figures
• As a team
• Strong background
• Here to help!

6
Y'all - Background

• Junior/Senior/other?
• CS/ECE/INI/other?
• Group programming before?
• Done a branch merge before?

7
Y'all - Reading

• Read a Ph.D. thesis?
• Academic journal article?
• Attended an academic conference?
• Read a non-class CS book last semester?

8
Y'all Career plans

• Industry
• Graduate school
• Law/med/business school?
• Mountain top?

9
Information sources

• Web site http//www.cs.cmu.edu/410
• You are required to read the syllabus
• Q Can I use a linked list for ...?
• A academic.cs.15-410.qa
• Reading this will be to your benefit
• Q Important announcements from us
• A academic.cs.15-410.announce
• You are responsible for reading this often

10
Information sources

• Q I have a final exam conflict...
• Q The license server is down...
• Q AFS says no such device...
• A staff-410_at_cs.cmu.edu

11
Health Problems

• Somebody will probably get mono or pneumonia
• Work-blocking health problem?
• Go early to Student Health
• Avoid For the past two weeks I dragged myself to
  class but couldn't focus on programming
• Try to get paper documentation of work
  restrictions
• Your program administrator will inform
  instructors
• CS cathyf_at_cs

12
Academic honesty

• See syllabus
• Learning is good
• ...practices which avoid learning are double-plus
  ungood
• Plagiarism is bad
• ...credit must be given where due

13
Academic conduct

• Being a partner
• Responsible
• I am writing three grad school applications next
  week
• Irresponsible
• vanish for 1 week, drop class

14
The deadline disaster

• If you wait until the last minute, it takes only
  a minute! -- Vince Cate
• Small problem
• Your grade will probably suffer
• Big problem
• Learning and retention require sleep
• Why work super-hard only to forget?

15
Course Goals

• Operating Systems
• What they are
• Design decisions
• Actual construction
• Team programming
• Design, documentation
• Source control
• People skills

16
Course Plan

• Lectures
• Many topics will be covered by text
• Skipping every lecture will challenge your grade
• The map is not the terrain, the slides are not
  the lecture
• You will miss QA?

17
Course Plan

• Projects
• Stack crawler - readiness check 1-person
  project
• Bare-machine video game 1-person project
• Thread library
• OS kernel
• Kernel extension
• Project environment
• Virtutech Simics PC simulator
• Can also run on real PC hardware

18
Course plan

• Homework assignments
• 3, to deepen understanding of selected topics
• Reading assignment
• Pick something fun, write a brief report
• Mid-term, Final exam
• Closed-book

19
Team programming

• Why?
• Not for instructor's convenience!
• Allows attacking larger problems
• Teaches job skills you will need
• Very few individual contributor jobs, even
  academia
• Team programming ! software engineering
• No requirement analysis
• No release staging, design for growth, ...
• Not a complete life cycle

20
Team programming Styles

• Waterfall model
• Spiral model
• Extreme Programming
• Pair Programming
• Williams Kessler, Pair Programming
• What you choose is up to you
• This is an opportunity to read about models

21
Team programming - Design

• Decomposition into modules
• (Yes, even in C)
• Design for team implementation
• May need to adjust design to work in parallel

22
Team programming - Documentation

• For the non-compiler consumers of source code
• Doxygen documentation extraction system
• Embed documentation in comments
• Generate HTML index
• Generate LaTeX
• ...
• We intend to read your documentation
• We intend to read your code

23
Team programming - Source control

• Other buzzwords
• Revision control, configuration management
• Goals
• Re-create past builds
• Compare stable states
• Control inter-developer interference
• Manage multiple shipped product versions

24
Team programming - Source control

• Even for small projects?
• It worked 3 hours ago, now it dies on start-up
• I thought I fixed that already!
• Most students who really try it keep using it

25
Team programming - People skills

• Working with other people is hard
• People think differently
• People plan differently
• Pre-planning
• Agree on work style, arrangements
• Setting milestones
• Pre-scheduled common time slots
• Handling problems
• Involving management before it's too late

26
Grading philosophy

• C all parts of problem addressed
• B solution is complete, stable, robust
• A excellent
• Somebody might want to re-use some of your code
• Numbers
• A 90-100, B 80-90, ... (roughly)
• Curving - maybe, not necessarily
• Lots of A's would be fine with us
• But this requires clean, communicative code!

27
Closing

• comp.risks newsgroup
• Developers should read this
• Managers should read this
• Journalists should read this
• Textbook
• Chapters 1, 2, 3
• Chapter 13.1, 13.2, 13.3.3
• Start choosing a partner for P2/P3